Water as a conflict-causing resource
Heading towards a watercrisis Water is the most essential good for life and without water no creature can survive. Furthermore, we need it to make the majority of our food and to produce a huge part of other devices we are using in everyday life. Although most people in Europe, America or other industrialized nations take water for granted and can buy it everywhere and everytime, we are heading to a global watercrisis: Half of the world population lacks basic sanitation services; 80% of the diseases in the poor countries of the South are spread by consuming unsafe water; 90% of the Third World’s wastewater is still discharged untreated into local rivers and streams; water-borne pathogens and pollution kill 25 million people every year; every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water; and every year diarrhea kills nearly three million children. Water quality has caused several diseases, among them: malaria, cholera, and typhoid. It is very clear that the world’s poor are taking the brunt of the crisis, whether we are talking about water-borne diseases or outright scarcity. Nevertheless, industrialized countries can be concerned, too. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than half of the wells in the US are contaminated with pesticides and nitrates. Collectively 53 million Americans – which is nearly 20%- drink water contaminated with lead, fecal bacteria, or other serious pollutants. The EPA claims that disease outbreaks associated with groundwater sources grew by almost 30% between 1995 and 1998 in the United States and the World Health Organisation has said that the increasing use of pesticides is killing forty thousand people every year. The impact of water on our food Today approximately 40% of the world’s food is obtained from irrigated land. That number has grown exponentially in the last several decades and is likely to continue rising. Today agricultural operations are already using water from water reserves to support current production. Doing so, they are destroying water reserves for future generations in an irreversible process. Thus the question arises where farmers are going to find the additional irrigation water needed to satisfy the food demand of the more than two billion people expected to join humanity’s ranks in the next several decades. (It was just 31st of October 2011, when the world population got officially announced to be 7 billion) Potential for conflict, because of the struggle for water access Water has much in common with oil. Some countries have sufficient, others don’t. Both water and energy are key inputs into any economy, so countries without the basic source will depend on other countries that do have it. North Africa and the Middle East, but also countries like Mexico and Japan are heavily dependent on the import of water-intensive commodities. Furthermore, about 40% of the world’s population relies on river systems shared by two or more countries. Since every country needs the water of the river for drinking, irrigation, and hydro power it puts the countries, in which the river doesn’t have its source, in a vulnerable position. Given the reality of dependencies between different communities for water, the pollution of existing sources and the growing demand for water, it is inevitable that conflicts will arise over access. All over the world, communities in water-stressed countries are beginning to compete with one another for prior use of this precious resource. Tensions are growing across nation-state borders and between cities and rural communities industrialized and non-industrialized nations. According to UNESCO, the current interstate conflicts occur mainly in the Middle East (disputes stemming from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers among Turkey, Syria, and Iraq; and the Jordan River conflict among Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestine territories), in Africa (Nile River-related conflicts among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan),2 as well as in Central Asia (the Aral Sea conflict among Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan). Although most struggles for water-access are between countries it can become a trigger for arguments even within a country. For example in the U.S. a dispute between Nebraska and Kansas over the use of water from the Republican River has been taken all the way to Supreme Court. Kansas has alleged that Nebraska has allowed unregulated and unrestricted well drilling and pumping in the river basin, which depleted the flow of water into Kansas. If we go on wasting our resources on the expense of coming generations and the Third World we risk wars caused by enviousness and desperation. Today we are going to put a large number of Third-World countries in such a desperate situation. Many African countries are still paying 70% of their national budgets to repay their debts to the IMF and the World Bank which is partly the reason why they don’t have enough money for water infrastructure, most local governments in Africa cannot even afford. North Americans and Europeans have set themselves on a path that is leading to water scarcity. So far, resources in these nations appear to be abundant, but we are moving at our limits. Current rates of consumption will lead to depletion and considering industrializing nations trying to emulate western lifestyles we are heading to a watercrisis, which will cause even more and harder-fought conflicts, than we know today.